Court documents also depict him trying to destroy potential evidence,
saying he emailed his brother to “delete all of my emails from the
yahoo site,” expressing “concern about them subp[o]ening yahoo at some
point,” while concocting other fake documents to show the jury.

Jurors were barred from hearing a recording of a phone call in which
Omar Amanat dropped the name of Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s right-hand
woman, to a government witness, with defense lawyers saying the remark
was “irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial,” according to the Associated Press.

The indictment charges
that Amanat convinced people to invest millions of dollars in a tech
company called Kit Digital and lied to them to hide the fact that the
company was hemorrhaging cash. “The evidence of their criminal schemes
was so overwhelming that Amanat actually tried to fool the jury by
introducing fake emails into the record as exculpatory ‘evidence’ in
this trial,” acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said in a
statement. Prosecutors said he re-purposed millions of dollars of the
company’s money for his own personal use.

Amanat posted to his web site Tuesday a cryptic blog post called “Injustice In America,” saying, “The facts of this case will all be made plain to see shortly.
You’ve only seen snippets. You’re only seen what they want you to see.
Stay tuned…”

It was just the latest in a long series of allegations that Amanat has built his riches by lying and gaming the system.

In 2013, Amanat partnered with Vladislav Doronin to buy a luxury resort for $358 million.

An in-depth 2014 profile
in Fortune magazine says Doronin is “referred to in the British press
as the ‘Russian Donald Trump.'” Dorinin was born in what was then
Leningrad before moving to Geneva to work for Marc Rich,a financier who
fled the U.S. after being indicted for fraud and trading with Iran, and
was pardoned by former President Bill Clinton on Clinton’s last day in
office.

“Clinton’s motive for pardoning Rich on his last day in office was
questioned,” USA Today reports, “because Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich,
was a wealthy Democratic donor who made a $450,000 donation to Clinton’s
presidential library foundation and more than $100,000 to Hillary
Clinton’s Senate campaign.” The pardon was investigated by the FBI in
2001.

Amanat, for his part, claimed he made more than $200 million selling shares of Twitter. (An account purporting to be his hasn’t tweeted since 2013; its most recent two tweets are about Abedin and a “defense of Islam.”)

Amanat invested in the resort through Peak Ventures, “whose assets
include his money as well as that of family and friends,” the Fortune
profile reports.

In 2008,the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) had
permanently barred Amanat “from associating with any FINRA member firm
in any capacity” for repeatedly failing to disclose legal judgments and
an SEC investigation.

In 2002, he sold a company called Tradescape for $100 million to
E*Trade, which charged that Amanat hid that before it was sold, the
company had “no money! Zero. Zilch. Nada… We can’t pay any of our
bills,” as one employee wrote in a contemporaneous email, according to
the Forbes piece.

He declared bankruptcy and a creditor tried to seize his house, but
Amanat allegedly backdated a document –notarized by his mother–claiming
he had sold the house to his brother for $10 the prior year. The
creditor prevailed and the house was sold.

In another court case, the judge found that he had refused to comply with six court orders to produce documents.

Amanat will be sentenced April 25. Another cousin of Abedin’s, Irfan Amanat,
has been also charged with fraud and will be tried separately. He, too,
has a long record of flouting rules: In 2006, the Securities and
Exchange Commission said as chief technology officer of a brokerage, he
“engaged in a fraudulent scheme” by writing a computer program that tricked the Nasdaq exchange into giving him $50,000 in rebates.

Huma Abedin was vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign
and her deputy chief of staff at the Department of State. She was paid
at least $490,000 in one year
while she worked at the State Department after Clinton signed off on an
unusual staffing arrangement that allowed her to work as a consultant
to Teneo, a Clinton-connected company, as well as the Clinton Foundation
and Hillary herself, all while also working at State. The Washington
Post reports, “her overlapping roles make it diﬃcult to determine when she was working for the public and when her work was beneﬁting a private interest.”

The New York Times reports, “Abedin did not disclosethe arrangement — or how much income she earned — on her financial
report. It requires officials to make public any significant sources of
income.”

Abedin was interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation into Clinton’s unofficial email server and stated she “did not learn
Clinton was using a private server until after Clinton’s [Department of
State] tenure,” though other emails show her involved in discussions about the server, and the aide who set it up told the FBI he discussed it with Abedin."

The glow of their triumph wouldn’t last. The
partnership between Amanat and Doronin imploded with a velocity exceeded
only by the speed at which it was put together. Conflict erupted, with
allegations of fraud, conspiracy, extortion, intimidation, breach of
contract, and an attempted coup. Relations between the two deteriorated
so dramatically that at one point, Doronin told Amanat, according to a
claim in the latter’s legal filings, “If I feel you tried to screw me, I
will hunt you down and shoot you.” A Doronin spokesperson denies the
allegation.

Then came the lawsuits, massing some 30 attorneys in
New York and London and featuring an international cast of characters
that includes Adrian Zecha, Aman’s 81-year-old Singapore-based founder,
and Johan Eliasch, the 52-year-old London-based CEO of sporting goods
firm Head. A new hearing, following a series of temporary injunctions
that were issued in July, was scheduled for Sept. 15 in the London High
Court.

With Amanat and Doronin locked in a nasty feud as
each vies for control, Aman—the word means “peace” in Sanskrit—is
anything but tranquil. At stake is the future of the company. Beyond
that, mysteries abound, most particularly: Who, exactly, are the two men
brawling for this prize?

2. The Trader, The Supermodel, and The PoetOmar Amanat believed he was perfectly positioned to make a deal when he
heard Aman (the resemblance of the resort’s name to his surname is
coincidental) was up for sale in May 2013. A professed Aman junkie who
says he has invested in hotels, he notes, “It was a trophy asset, and I
was interested in buying it.”The son of Indian immigrants, Amanat grew up in
Queens, N.Y., and later New Jersey. His career originated in his
father’s basement. As stock trading—including the rapid in-and-out
version known as day trading—became a frenzied pastime for some
middle-class types in the 1990s, his dad set up a tiny operation
downstairs in the family house.

At age 23, Amanat joined Datek, a well-known
day-trading outfit, and he says he later helped build a stock-trading
platform that let regular investors track every buy and sell order for a
specific stock in real time, just as the professionals at the big
brokerage houses did. In 1997 he founded Tradescape, a direct-access
brokerage firm. By 2000 the company had acquired four subsidiaries,
including MarketXT, and was generating estimated annual revenues of $140
million. Amanat says he fielded numerous acquisition offers.
“Tradescape was the biggest day-trading company,” he boasts.

In 2002, Amanat sold Tradescape to E*Trade for $100
million in stock plus an additional $180 million if the company hit
certain targets. It seemed a moment of exultation and riches, but the
bubble quickly burst, and Amanat became entangled in lengthy litigation
(more on that later).

Despite the turmoil of his court fight, Amanat
presented a serene face to the world: a glamorous mix of wealth,
elegance, and more than a dollop of substance. He was a man about town,
charismatic and dashing—with a trademark scarf draped over his well-cut
blazer—the sort who could seduce a supermodel (in fact, he married one:
Helena Houdová, his second wife, from whom he is separated). Amanat was
also fond of quoting the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi.

It’s not clear what Rumi said about self-promotion, but Amanat has not
been shy about touting his accomplishments. Among the accolades recorded
on his personal website is being named one of Wall Street’s Top 10 Most
Influential Technologists and one of the Top 500 Most Influential
Muslims in the World. He sat on the boards of Human Rights Watch and
Malaria No More. And various Amanat-related websites credit him with
co-founding the UN-affiliated Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund and
Bridges TV, a television network aimed at countering negative
stereotypes of Islam."...